Healing the Child Within

Healing Our Inner Child

As the adult, it is time to re-parent, make peace with, and heal that wounded part of you once and for all. It is your responsibility to accept what happened to you as a child, stop torturing yourself, and claim the life you are deserving of. Now is the time to make better choices and think healthier thoughts. ~Randi G. Fine~

There are clear indications when our wounded inner child cries out for help. The sorrow and pain we feel when he calls out to us is overwhelming.

But not wanting to suffer these raw emotions our tendency is to do everything we can in the moment to block them. We run away from the pain. Some people stay busy all the time, sun up to sun down, leaving very little waking time to feel it. Some people try to numb the pain with drugs, alcohol, or other compulsive addictions. We push the child away; try to stuff it back down where we can’t see or feel it anymore.

But denying, suppressing, and hiding the parts of ourselves that make us uncomfortable are defense mechanisms that prolong our suffering. Choosing to remain unconscious only allows the wounded inner child to take control of our personality and overpower our will.

We cannot change what happened in the past. We cannot go back and get our needs met by those who were incapable of doing it in the first place. We cannot immerse ourselves in God or our higher power, hoping he will magically release us from the pain of our past. And we cannot overcompensate by being wonderful human beings. The past is the past. There is no way to undo what was already done.

The time comes when we must claim our adulthood; accept our past and take responsibility for healing the painful emotions associated with it. If we want to rid ourselves of these feelings once and for all, and become happy and whole, we have to face and own the parts of ourselves that we don’t like; the parts that we don’t want to deal with.

Self-love requires loving every part of our selves. We can’t pick and choose the parts we like and still claim to love ourselves. Self- love requires taking ownership of the child we once were and making peace with it; merging the fragmented parts of ourselves into one healthy union.

Becoming aware of the wounded part of ourselves, the neglected child within, is the first step toward healing the pain of the past. The awareness allows us to develop compassion for this innocent little boy or girl. It allows us to understand and accept that what happened to him or her was not his or her fault. When we can show compassion for our wounded inner child we can encourage him to come out of hiding, open up and share his pain with us. That is what will ultimately lead to his healing.

To accomplish that we have to gain some objectivity and wake up to the reality of how our childhood wounds are impacting our lives now. When we acknowledge this part of ourselves we develop a deeper connection with our self as a whole, and gain control over the reactions our wounded child triggers. This intentional way of living puts us in the driver’s seat of our lives.

Once we are mindful of what exists within us we can begin the process of healing it. We can show compassion to our inner child and tell him that whatever happened was not his fault. The problem is that if we’ve never shown ourselves compassion before, it will not be easy to show it to our inner child. The wounded part of ourselves felt responsible then and still feels responsible now.

For many years we have relied on others to re-parent us. We have leaned on our friends, boyfriends or girlfriends, spouses, or therapists. We have tried to work through past issues with the same dysfunctional parents who created the mess in the first place. We’ve poured our hearts out, pleaded and threatened, and gotten absolutely nowhere.

We’ve relied on others to re-parent us for much of our adult life because we didn’t understand why we felt the way we did; we didn’t know any other way to relieve the suffering we felt. So the problem never got fixed; temporarily maybe, permanently no. That’s because no one can fix us except us. Once we become adults we must assume responsibility for our lives. That includes mustering up the courage to face our inner child and assume responsibility for his inner needs; in other words, we have to re-parent and re-raise him.

So how do we do that? We begin to re-parent our child within by imagining the parent we wish we’d had. That is the parent your child needs now. He needs you to be strong for him, just as you hoped your parent would have been strong for you. He needs guidelines; he needs you to teach him the discipline, structure, and boundaries that he never learned.

Our responsibility is to help him become whole and functional. That requires nurturing him; giving him the love, acceptance, safety, support, and validation that he needed but never got as a child.